Dealing with the hauntings and echoes of Austria's colonial past, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński—visual artist, writer, and recipient of the Camera Austria Prize 2021—sets the stage for the what-if, while confronting viewers with the violence of the Western gaze.
To challenge hegemonic archives, and with them the representations of Blackness inhabiting these very spaces, is to struggle for connection, voice, language, not least for images. Even more so in a time and space in which the stickiness of a colonial past is dismissed.
Dealing with the hauntings and echoes of Austria's colonial past, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński sets the stage for the what-if, while confronting viewers with the violence of the Western gaze. Introducing readers to a multiplicity of voices—artists, thinkers, and scholars with whom she is in conversation and communion—the artist's catalogue opens a space for Black diasporan artistic practices. Here, the reverberating echoes and residues of a past ongoing become visible as effects in what we have come to call "the present".
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (born 1980 in Vienna) is a writer, artist, and scholar. Rooted in Black feminist theory, she has developed a research-based and process-oriented investigative practice that often deals with archives, specifically with the voids in public archives and collections. Interlacing the documentary with the fictional, her works manifest themselves through a variety of media and dissect the present of an everlasting colonial past: a past without closure.
